At the edge of tweaking

Menu

Disable Align Desktop Icons to Grid in Windows 10

Your Desktop is a special folder which shows your background wallpaper that you have chosen and your files, folders, documents, shortcuts and all such items you have stored. It appears every time you sign in to Windows. In this article, will we learn how to disable the Align Desktop Icons to Grid feature for your user account in Windows 10.

Tip: In earlier Windows versions, the Desktop had important icons enabled by default - This PC, Network, Control Panel, and your User files folder. They were all visible by default. However, in modern Windows versions, Microsoft made most of these icons hidden. In Windows 10, only the Recycle Bin is present on the Desktop by default. Also, the Windows 10 Start Menu does not have links to these icons either. You can enable classic Desktop icons as follows:

By default, Align Desktop Icons is enabled. If you drag and drop icons anywhere on the Desktop, they will be snapped to a grid and will get auto-arranged. It is possible to disable this feature and to place the desktop icons at any position you like on Desktop. Here is how to disable this feature.

To disable Align Desktop Icons to Grid on Desktop in Windows 10, do the following.

About Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.

Post navigation

7 thoughts on “Disable Align Desktop Icons to Grid in Windows 10”

Sonya

Thank you, Sergey, for this article on how to disable Windows 10 Align Desktop Icons to Grid through the registry. You have stopped a constant nuisance, that I’ve had to fix over and over again. Now I have my desktop defaulting to 1075839520. What a joy!

Just now tried it in Safe Mode, Administrator. The decimal value I set to 1075839520, that changed the hexadecimal value to 669af90. But on reboot, it changed back to hexadecimal 0x48200224, decimal 1210057252. I had made sure the FFlags was a 32-bit DWORD.

Has Microsoft put a limit on what kind of changes to the registry we can make?

I’m having the exact same problem as Sonya. When Explorer shuts down and restarts, the FFlags reset to 1210057252. Occasionally, the icons will auto arrange to the left side of the screen. I was hoping that Sonya figured this out and has a solution. Changing the option in the context menu has no effect on this behavior.